Every prospect asks themselves 3 questions before becoming a client.

  • Should I pay attention?
  • Can I trust you?
  • Is your recommendation going to work for me?

In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with marketing messages and other distractions, one of the hardest things is to get attention.

Ask yourself what would get your ideal prospect to stop scrolling through their newsfeed, prick up their ears or respond to your email message or cold call.  What would make them curious enough to give you more than a couple of seconds of attention?

To cut through, your message has to be succinct and targeted precisely at a pain point you know your prospects face.  Something you know they will want to solve.  And equally importantly, pay to do so.

I’ll get to how to elicit these pain points in a minute.

Next, your prospects are wondering if they can trust you.  Are you the real deal?  Do you care about me over just wanting to sell your wares.

Reminds me of the saying, “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care”.

We all buy from people we know, like and trust.

And as we buy from people, your ability to relate to your prospects and clients is paramount.

Your prospects must rapidly feel you understand them and their issues.  That you have the ability to solve them.

Bring out issues they may not have considered.  Provoke discussion.  Help them look at things from different angles and perspectives.

And finally your prospects want to know if what you’re recommending is right for them.

Educate your prospects as the efficacy of your solutions through whitepapers, articles, videos, webinars, seminars/workshops, interviews with other clients and case studies.  You show them how to buy by explaining how they should evaluate your offerings in comparison to your competition.  What questions they should be asking to ensure the solution will be a good fit.

Obviously your goal is to highlight your value proposition, differentiation and ease of doing business with.

So back to how you elicit your market’s pain points and hone your messages so they resonate and attract attention.

The short answer is you ask your clients.

Make a list of everything you do for your clients.  Then break this down into small granular chunks.  Each item represents on job your clients want done.

Then interview your clients and ask what value they put on each.  Use a scale of 1 to 10 so you get consistency over a number of clients.

In our experience over hundreds of interviews, you’ll start to notice a pattern after about 3 to 6 clients.

Obviously the more you do the better, but there will be a point of diminishing returns.

If your product or service is used by or affects different levels in the organisation – for example top management as well as IT and users, make sure you ask each segment.  The relative values will be different.

Your next stage is to plot these into the chart and look for patterns.

Once you confirm what’s truly important for each type of user, you’ll have directly actionable input for your marketing and sales efforts as you’ll only need to highlight these aspects rather than boring your prospects with stuff that isn’t relevant to them.

Finally, if you know you need to do this but are worried about how to go about it and the responses you’ll get from your clients, reach out to us.

We’ve guided all our clients through this process and they’ve been positively surprised at the responses and market intelligence they get from their clients which has resulted in more business.

Call Rashid on 0414 913 334.

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